Huddersfield Town fell to their heaviest defeat in their (admittedly short) Premier League history to a sensational Manchester City team. It was a game where little went right for Town, and Manchester City took full advantage of our defensive frailties.
Here’s a quick look at some of the reasons this was a bad day at the office for Town…
The opposition
It’s easy to look at start blaming Town for this result, but it’s important to acknowledge that we were up against an excellent team. Manchester City were by far the best team in last season’s Premier League. Not only that, they’re being frequently compared to the all-time best Premier League teams (and plenty before the Premier League started too).
There was an abundance of talent on the pitch for Manchester City yesterday, and while Town gave them the space to play, it was impressive to watch them carve us open time after time. I can imagine it would feel similar to getting beaten up by a gold medal winning Olympic wrestler, it hurts to be on the receiving end, but you can’t help but admire the skill on display.
I’m going to complain about Town in the rest of this article, but I wanted to emphasise that Man City were excellent and deserved to win by a large margin. If Town had played their best possible team, with every player on top of their game, it’s likely we’d have still lost. Unfortunately, we were a long way from our best.
The tactics
When our backs were to the wall last season we pulled off consecutive draws against Manchester City and Chelsea to confirm our survival before the last day of the season. Those two points came from playing very defensive football and receiving quite a bit of luck. We’ve tried to play the same way in the first two games of this season and it’s not looked even close to yielding similar results.
Yesterday, Town were far more negative against City than they were last week against Chelsea, and the almost complete lack of attacking threat meant that Man City could attack us without having to fear any counter-attacks. We made it easy for them to build pressure and relentlessly attack us.
We’ve got a bit of time before we play top-six opposition again (Spurs at the end of September), in that time I think we need to work on a different approach that makes us more competitive in these games. Playing open, attacking football isn’t a good idea, but neither is trying to defend with ten men behind the ball for 90 minutes. There are plenty of ways to play in between these extremes and finding the balance between attack and defence is going to be the only way we can get something when we play top-six opposition in the future.
The missing players
David Wagner was unlucky to have key players unavailable to him on the day. Injuries to Hogg and Zanka, paired with Aaron Mooy attending the birth of his second child, meant we were missing three of our most important players.
I’m not going to pick fault with the players that came in to replace these key men, but obviously we missed three of our most experienced and composed players. It’s hard to imagine we’d have been quite so disorganised at the back with Zanka, retained the ball so poorly in midfield with Mooy, and allowed City to have so much possession on the edge of the area with Hogg.
These players were sorely missed, and I hope that Zanka and Hogg are able to get themselves back into contention in time for the Cardiff game.
I’d also like to add that it was absolutely the right thing for Aaron Mooy to be with his wife during the birth of his child. I can imagine some more old-school fans might have grumbled about his absence, but family has to come before work.
The mistakes
I’ve mentioned how well City played on the day, but it’s also worth mentioning that we made it easy for them at times too. We coughed up the ball to their attackers in our own box on countless occasions. At least three of the six goals conceded had a calamitous piece of Town defending in there somewhere.
I’m not going to bother picking out individuals and blaming them for this result. Plenty of players made basic errors which led to goal-scoring opportunities. Some were worse than others, but nobody was individually to blame for this humbling defeat.
In some ways it’s better to make lots of mistakes in a game we were very likely to lose anyway. I hope we’ve got them all out of our system ahead of Cardiff next weekend, where a single error could lead to points being dropped.
Some positives from the game…
It’s hard to pick too many positives from this defeat, but here are a few I can think of:
- We won’t play any of the big teams until Spurs at the end of September now, so we should see a return of the 4-2-3-1 formation and more attacking football
- These last two beatings will hopefully mean David Wagner thinks up a new approach to playing the big teams
- Cardiff at home on Saturday will be a completely different game, and Town’s starting XI could be mostly different too
- We expected to lose the two opening games when the fixtures came out, now we’ve got them out of the way we can properly start our season
- We’re only six points off the top of the league…
OK, maybe we’ll have to write off winning the league. However, it’s important to not get too carried away with early results. Crystal Palace didn’t score a goal for the first few months of last season but finished the season well clear of the relegation zone. There’s a lot of football still to be played, and I know this Town team can bounce back from disappointing results.